Industry news

In a significant announcement, the Big Blue has bagged a major 10 year contract for managing Jet Airways’ IT. IBM has significant presence in India, with around 14 offices in different cities across the country. According to IBM, the Rs. 285 crore ($62 Million) deal is a first of its kind in Indian aviation. As part of the agreement, IBM will be managing the IT infrastructure which includes services like:

Airport operations

Frequent flier programs

Application support services

Employee transition

Data centre operations

Central help desk support

Server and storage operations

Internet security services

Network management

SAP and other operating system

Jet Airways is one of India’s biggest operator with a fleet of 90 air crafts that fly to and from 65 destinations around the world. With this deal Jet Airways expects to have better integration of their IT systems to increase efficiency. Nikos Kardassis (CEO ,Jet Airways India) said, “This association will enable us to focus on our core business and improve our operational efficiencies, besides delivering a seamless customer experience.”

IBM has been working in the aviation segment for a long time, with their more recent project being working with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to build a better security system for their computer networks. IBM is proud to have won the contract, IBM India/South Asia Distribution VP Sameer Batra says, “The agreement with Jet Airways is a significant milestone for IBM in the aviation industry. Jet Airways will have access to industry expertise and knowledge, which are essential for sustaining growth and leadership in the competitive global market.”

Cognizant (CTSH), a leading provider of consulting, technology, and business process outsourcing services, announced a joint development program with Microsoft to deliver cloud enabled solutions to enterprise customers. As part of this program, Cognizant has set up a state-of-the-art “Octane Solution Center” to accelerate development of cloud-enabled next-generation solutions that integrate Cognizant business services and Microsoft technologies.

The Octane Solution Center extends Cognizant’s long-term partnership with Microsoft and will facilitate collaboration between customers and senior business technology specialists, solution architects, security experts, and change management professionals. Enterprise decision makers will be able to discover, envision, prototype, and evaluate innovative cloud-enabled solutions to their business problems. Cognizant’s industry-aligned Octane solutions will ultimately deliver disruptive levels of value by combining a full range of Cognizant services—including consulting, solution accelerators, and technology management—and Microsoft cloud-enabling technologies such as Azure.

Bob Perry, Director of Product Engineering at LexisNexis, USA, a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions for the legal industry, said, “Cognizant has been an integral innovation partner for LexisNexis in our adoption of new Microsoft-based technologies aimed at the delivery of next-generation products for the legal research market. Cognizant has provided the expertise and best practices necessary to leverage the promise of changing technology in meeting the demands of our customers. Their expertise and dedication to our relationship has positioned us for growth, scalability, and customer satisfaction.”

Inaugurating the Center in Bangalore, S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft, said, “Enterprises seeking to adopt cloud technologies are looking for trusted advisors to help them address their concerns and show them how organizations can realize the potential of applying cloud technologies. Cognizant, with its proven expertise on Microsoft technologies, deep domain knowledge, and innovative solutions, is well placed to provide advice and lead customers toward profiting from Microsoft cloud services.”

Cognizant is a key Microsoft global service integrator and has dedicated Microsoft centers of excellence built to design and implement business technology solutions that employ a broad portfolio of Microsoft technologies. The jointly funded Octane Solution Center expands the long-standing alliance to focus on creating next-generation solutions that enable new thresholds of business performance by leveraging cloud delivery models and technologies.

“Cognizant’s early capabilities on Windows Azure are helping us explore potential solutions for our customers using this technology,” said Rajaramana Macha, Senior Vice President of R&D at Invensys Operations Management, a leading provider of industrial automation and information technologies, systems, software solutions, services, and consulting to global manufacturing and infrastructure industries.

“Cognizant is committed to helping customers create optimized levels of business performance for the new virtualized organization, and delivering services that enable them to increase business effectiveness, efficiency, innovation, and virtualization. This strategic program will enable our customers to realize the full potential of Microsoft Cloud technologies and redefine the way they deliver value to their customers,” said R Chandrasekaran, President and Managing Director of Global Delivery at Cognizant.

Cloud-computing services consumed from external service providers (ESPs) are estimated to be 10.2 percent of the spending on external IT services, according to a worldwide survey by Gartner, Inc.

From April through July 2010, Gartner surveyed 1,587 respondents in 40 countries to understand general IT spending trends and spending on key initiatives such as cloud computing. Participants were IT budget management professionals (CIOs, IT VPs, IT directors, IT managers, etc.). Four hundred eighty-four respondents participated in the drill-down on cloud computing and were asked how their organization's current budget for cloud computing was distributed, as well as what their estimate was for spending next year.

"The cloud market is evolving rapidly, with 39 percent of survey respondents worldwide indicating they allocated IT budget to cloud computing as a key initiative for their organization," said Bob Igou, research director at Gartner. "One-third of the spending on cloud computing is a continuation from the previous budget year, a further third is incremental spending that is new to the budget, and 14 percent is spending that was diverted from a different budget category in the previous year."

Forty-six percent of respondents with budget allocated to cloud computing indicated they planned to increase the use of cloud services from external providers. Gartner analysts said there is a shift toward the "utility" approach for noncore services, and increased investment in core functionality, often closely aligned with competitive differentiation.

More respondents expected an increase in spending for private cloud implementations that are for internal or restricted use of the enterprise (43 percent) than those that are for external and/or public use (32 percent).

"Overall, these are healthy investment trends for cloud computing. This is yet another trend that indicates a shift in spending from traditional IT assets such as the data center assets and a move toward assets that are accessed in the cloud," said Mr. Igou. "The trends are good news for IT services providers that have professional services geared to implementing cloud environments and those that deliver cloud services. It is bad news for technology providers and IT services firms that are not investing and gearing up to deliver these new services seeing an increased demand by buyers."

On a regional basis, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and North America spent between 40 and 50 percent of the cloud budget on cloud services from ESPs. Latin America was the exception, with a notably larger portion of budgets being spent on developing and implementing private and public cloud environments, reflecting the need to cater to the close business relationships and high-touch interactions that are characteristics of the Latin culture.

"Cloud-based IT services are evolving fast and differently in the countries and regions surveyed. Service marketing managers for IT services providers must be monitoring the contract value and intentions of customers for their service lines and cloud service offerings at the country and regional levels of their operations," said Mr. Igou. "Demand is shifting from traditional proprietary and highly customized assets to ubiquitous assets that are accessed by customers. Service marketing and service delivery managers need to lead the curve of investment in the skills and capabilities of their service offerings, which means investing before having contracts."

Capgemini, one of the world's foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, today announced that its subsidiary Capgemini Outsourcing Services SAS ("Capgemini"), has been awarded a long-term contract from Nokia Siemens Networks, a leading global enabler of communications services, to support the company's global order management operations. This engagement leverages Capgemini's in-depth knowledge of the telecommunications market and its industry-leading experience in supply chain business process outsourcing.

Capgemini will provide order management services to Nokia Siemens Networks, including preparation for delivery, customer order management, distribution and customer invoicing, while customer facing activities will remain with Nokia Siemens Networks. Capgemini will leverage its BPOpen™ technology platform and its Rightshore® network to harmonize and standardize the processes across Nokia Siemens Networks’ worldwide operations.

Under the terms of the agreement, close to 400 employees from Nokia Siemens Networks will be joining Capgemini BPO Supply Chain Services teams from several countries including Brazil, China, Finland, Germany and India. Additionally, more than 300 contractors to Nokia Siemens Networks will continue their work under Capgemini’s management.

“As clients face an increasingly global business environment, growing supply chain costs, and a larger ecosystem of partners and customers, a streamlined and sustainable supply chain will be key to growth”, said Hubert Giraud, Head of Capgemini BPO. “Capgemini’s collaborative and strategic approach to supply chain transformation, market knowledge and suite of enabling tools and technology will allow leading global companies like Nokia Siemens Networks to optimize their supply chain operations and achieve true competitive advantage.”

“Capgemini’s excellent reputation and proven track record of maximizing efficiency in business processes, along with its global delivery model, were major factors in our decision to select them as our partner and future employer of our logistics experts. We believe that this relationship will considerably improve our order management and delivery performance through shorter lead times, better quality and increased efficiency, while Nokia Siemens Networks will focus more intensely on the customer facing aspects of order management“, said Johannes Giloth, global head of Supply Chain, Nokia Siemens Networks.

CSC (CSC) today announced that a major multiline insurance provider has signed a license and maintenance contract for CSC’s New Business Accelerator (nbAccelerator) and Insurance Optics Business Analytics. The growing company will integrate the two new applications with its existing CSC policy administration system, CyberLife.

The insurer will use nbAccelerator for application submission, requirements management, work tracking management and policy issue processing for traditional life insurance, universal life insurance and disability income insurance. The company will also implement Business Analytics to access and analyze new business and customer data from multiple systems to proactively and quickly address changing conditions.

“nbAccelerator helps insurers speed new business and create efficiencies by eliminating processing steps, reducing handoffs and automating more tasks, while Business Analytics helps carriers transform new business data into useful, actionable information,” said Michael W. Risley, president of the Life Insurance and Annuity division of CSC’s Financial Services Group. “With world-class solutions such as these, CSC can help insurers reach their growth objectives and reduce the risks associated with change.”

nbAccelerator supports multiple products, distribution channels and administration systems, and provides the technology and business processes needed to seamlessly manage new business. Comprised of underwriting, automation, document management and production-proven work management, nbAccelerator decreases the cost of issuing life and annuity contracts while increasing productivity.

Business Analytics software and services, a part of CSC’s Insurance Optics family of business intelligence solutions, allow insurers to quickly monitor business results and their drivers. The software displays critical data in report or dashboard views with interactive filters, sliders and gauges that make it easy to drill down and reveal specific causes of particular outcomes.

HP today announced that Underwriters Laboratories (UL) has selected HP Networking solutions to improve the efficiency of its technology infrastructure and increase knowledge sharing among employees and customers through unified communications and collaboration (UC&C).

UL has been certifying consumer product safety and assessing compliance for more than 115 years. Each year, more than 20 billion UL marks appear on products from 72,000 manufacturers in 98 countries. However, growth of the company created challenges for an outdated technology infrastructure, hindering its ability to keep pace with customer demand or maintain a competitive advantage.

With the new UC&C solution provided by HP, UL has improved collaboration and communication among its 68 testing and certification facilities and labs. The solution integrates communications on a single enterprise-wide platform, supporting any method (voice, chat or email), location or device. As a result, UL can rely on real-time, integrated knowledge exchange among employees, partners and customers that increases overall business productivity.

UL’s UC&C solution incorporates Microsoft, Avaya and HP networking technologies to deliver unified messaging and instant messenger capabilities, as well as collaboration and voice services. This includes HP A-Series A12500 and A5500 switches. UL also has deployed HP E-Series E5400 and E8212 switches, and E-MSM760 Wireless LAN (WLAN) controllers with the E-MSM422 WLAN access points.

UL replaced 23 private branch exchange (PBX) systems with a single centralized solution for voice communications. The solution streamlines IT management with standardized desktop configurations for employees supported on a common network infrastructure. This enables UL to offer faster, higher quality and more customer-friendly services, which in turn allows manufacturers to accelerate the product life cycle – from research to manufacturing to recycling..

“UL continually seeks to improve collaboration among our customers as we become even more integral to how manufacturers develop and deliver safer products to market,” said Christian Anschetz, senior vice president and chief information officer, Underwriters Laboratories. “HP provided a roadmap to transform our network infrastructure to achieve these business goals while also supporting our plans to move towards a converged infrastructure that will further streamline IT operations and reduce costs.”

HP today announced it has completed its acquisition of Fortify Software.

The combination bridges static and dynamic security analysis across the application life cycle to help clients proactively reduce business risk against malicious attacks. With Fortify Software’s expertise and offerings, HP will offer a best-in-class solution that allows clients to properly address application security from development through operations, and scale to a Center of Excellence program.

The acquisition of Fortify enhances HP’s application life cycle strategy and enriches the HP Secure Advantage portfolio by adding a complete application security offering. With this addition, HP will deliver one of the most comprehensive security capabilities for securing mission-critical applications in heterogeneous environments.

Further details about the product integration will be announced at a later date.

Vertex, a leading global Customer Management Outsourcing (CMO) and Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) company operating across a wide range of market sectors and geographies, has today announced a joint venture with Shell Transource Ltd, one of India’s largest integrated domestic BPO.

The Vertex majority-owned joint venture will emerge as a significant CMO/BPO in India to deliver integrated services across voice, non-voice and fulfillment solutions to customers in over 350 locations in India.

Vertex will strengthen Shell Transource Ltd’s offering by integrating world-class CMO capabilities underpinned by industry specific technology and applications.

This joint venture will supplement Vertex’s capabilities delivered via its four service lines comprising CMO; IT Applications and Services; Consulting and Transformation; and Decision Sciences. The focus will be on Public Sector, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Telecom, Utilities and Retail. The combined strength will now be approximately 5,000 employees.

Paul Sweeny, CEO, Vertex Group, said, “India is one of the world's most attractive and rapidly growing markets. Today’s announcement shows our commitment to investing in this market and is part of our global strategy of broadening and deepening our CMO capabilities. We recognise a huge untapped opportunity within Shell Transource and their unique business model and have identified a valuable way of extending our CMO/BPO business in India. Our respective strengths are a natural fit and will address the fast evolving needs of the local market.”

Indian industrialists would take up the outsourcing issue during the Indo-US Private Sector Advisory Group (PSAG) meeting here on Tuesday, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry President, Mr Rajan Bharati Mittal, has said .

“Tomorrow (Tuesday), we will take in the PSAG (Private Sector Advisory Group) the outsourcing issue,” Mr Mittal said ahead of the trade advisory group meeting on the sidelines of the trade policy forum meeting, co-chaired by the Union Commerce and Indust ry Minister, Mr Anand Sharma, and his American counterpart, Mr Ron Kirk.

Mr Sharma arrived in Washington from Chicago on Monday evening and soon thereafter had a meeting with the Indian CEOs, here to attend the PSAG meeting.

“I have already told the Minister (Sharma) that as an industry body we are raising the issue of outsourcing,” Mr Mittal said.

He added, “On the one hand they (Americans) are talking about Indo-US partnership in innovation and technology and allowing all services; on the other they are restricting people’s services. That’s something which is not acceptable.”

“This is a serious issue for India. This is an important issue for us and we will take this us seriously,” he said.

When asked what was the response from the United States on the issues raised by India with regard to outsourcing and visa fee hike, the FICCI President said it was a “cold response’’.

Notably, Mr Sharma is yet to receive the response to the letter he wrote to Mr Kirk on the hike of categories of H-1B and L1 visas.

Besides outsourcing, the PSAG would be discussing three important issues logistics and urban development; urban infrastructure and technology and services.

“We have put a paper from the Indian side on urban infrastructure and logistics.They have put a paper on technology innovation and services,” Mr Mittal said.

Source:http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/businessline/blnus/14211102.htm

IBM is stepping up its presence in the business analytics market, announcing that it plans to acquire Netezza.

The company has entered a definitive agreement for the Massachusetts-based firm – known for its high performance data warehouse appliances and accompanying analytics applications – with a price tag of $1.7 billion (£1.09 billion) in cash.

The deal is still waiting to be approved by Netezza’s shareholders but IBM said it expected the deal to go through in the fourth quarter of this year.

"IBM is bringing analytics to the masses," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software and Systems.

"We continue to evolve our capabilities for systems integration, bringing together optimised hardware and software, in response to increasing demand for technology that delivers true business value. Netezza is a perfect example of this approach."

Once the deal is done, IBM plans to integrate the company into its Information Management software portfolio and will keep its 500 employees worldwide.

Jim Baum, president and chief executive (CEO) of Netezza, said: "Our customers choose our appliances for their fast time to value and how they simplify analytics against big data."

"Together with IBM, we are looking forward to extending our capabilities to a much broader market."